What is OCR?

OCR or Optical Character Recognition is the mechanical or electronic
translation of images into editable format such as Word or Text. The
images of both written and printed text can be translated. OCR is
inbuilt in an optical scanner to convert the input (read) text into
editable format. OCR can easily read different fonts and is compatible
with several languages. Due to its high accuracy rates and versatility,
OCR is used in different applications such as digital image processing,
advanced scanning, and artificial intelligence networks, apart from
regular scanning applications.

Which is the Best Font and Size to Be Used for OCR?

A font is a set of characters, usually (numbers) 0 - 9, (alphabets) A
through Z, and a few special characters. Each character within a font
has a defined size and shape which can be reproduced. For optical
character recognition, these characters are defined by the American
National Standards Institute (ANSI). The fonts are designed to be easily
reproduced and both human and machine readable. The best font to be used
for OCR is "Courier" or "Times New Roman" and the size should be between
9 and 20. Text in font sizes smaller than 9 are not as easily
recognized. Text larger than 72 point font may not be recognized since
at the larger sizes the font may be recognized as a picture within the
document rather than as text. OCR results will be best for images that
contain continuous text than sparsely spaced text.

What are Advantages of Using OCR?

Data Entry through OCR is faster, accurate, and more efficient than
manual data entry. The OCR process is simple, fast, easy and cheap. OCR
fonts or characters can be read even by the lower speed, lower cost
systems. Documents with multi-column layouts, different fonts, poor
quality or color images, are read accurately. Single page or multi page
scanning is possible. This software required in most of the fields
(involving documentation and communication, etc.) is available for easy
download for free too. The OCR reduces the process cost and time taken
to convert documents.